Telephone switches are devices which receive an incoming call on a first leg and route the call out to another device or part of the switch over another leg. In a well known legend in the world of hacking telephone switches, legend has it that John Draper (a.k.a. Captain Crunch) once hacked telephone switch after telephone switch, passing his phone call from one to another. At no charge, he routed a call through different phone switches in countries such as Japan, Russia and England and connected the call, after it went around the world, back to a phone sitting next to him in California, United States. The story continues that, after a few minutes, the phone next to him rang and he heard his own voice, though full of echoes and with a few seconds' delay. Legend further has it that Draper contacted former U.S. President Richard Nixon in this manner.
The above story, even if not true, and although about thirty years old, is a fairly accurate portrayal of one of the problems with telephone systems even today. In automated systems, a phone call can be passed back and forth between different communication legs directly to each other, or by way of other switches in between. This results in a waste of resources (multiple legs on the same switch may be open for what is actually a single phone call) and causes a degradation in call quality (either due to latency or loss of analog or digital data through multiple rebroadcasts).
Unfortunately, given the wide array of telecommunications equipment in place around the world, as well as various government regulations and privacy concerns, implementing any new method of tracking a phone call between switches would be exceedingly difficult. Current technology for tracking calls also has limitations. Automatic Number Identification codes (ANI codes) may change and CallerID codes may be unavailable or unreliable. However, such tracking would be very useful to detect and monitor calls such as the above-described call to Richard Nixon. What is needed is an inexpensive to implement method, using current phone technology, to track phone calls and route them in a more efficient manner to avoid wasting telecommunications resources and to counter abuse.